From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 7 17:30:54 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-52
Naked at the Epicenter
GECAA chapter 52
by Steven K. Roberts
Milpitas, CA -- August 9, 1989
Copyright 1989 by Steven K. Roberts. All rights reserved.
I had been writing until 1 A.M., crystallizing dreams and worries into one
of those passionate maundering documents too personal to publish, pumping space
music into my head and thinking of night. Tired. I crept to the bedroom,
found fragrant Maggie, curled against her. Automatically, with reflexes born
of 1,328 consecutive bedtimes, she turned on her side as I slipped my left arm
under her neck and draped my right across her, hands tangling just so. Ah,
warm flesh, so familiar: I kissed her shoulder and she wiggled a bit,
everything correctly in place. Just like every night, her hair tickled my nose
and we executed a perfectly choreographed series of moves to tuck it under her
head.
Lying there in the familiar nest I unconsciously invoked the nightly
summary/backup task -- the day's events gliding by, loose ends noted, delights
relived, problems put in context. Maggie's breath rasped softly. I began to
catch myself slipping; a foot twitching far away... the inhabitants of night
country awakening to romp in my head... lingering awareness of skin and hair.
The windows began rumbling. First flickering thought: the housemates are
making love two rooms away at a critical node in the framing structure,
imparting a resonant response that manifests itself in our room. My hypnogogic
brain sketched a glowing fluorescent engineering textbook illustration
captioned "every couple has its moment," briefly rendered a flawed analogy to
dipole antenna theory, and probed the soundspace for corroborating moans.
There were none... and the rumbling grew more intense.
I turned my head to open both ears, increasing receptor gain while adding
sonic location capability. In the cloud- diffused moonlight, I could see
movement: a bolus of adrenalin shot into my bloodstream and I sat up
wide-eyed.
The whole room was rocking, a cacophony of rattling objects from
throughout the house adding a shrill edge of panic to an already unsettling
loss of stability. Christy screamed from the TV room, and something rolled off
the desk. But the movement! The floor, which I usually consider to be a solid
and reliable outgrowth of an equally dependable earth, was moving to and fro,
rolling and bucking like a flat, tame version of those hydraulic broncos
catering to pre-lawsuit urban cowboys in the singles bars of yesteryear. I
wasn't about to try standing up on the thing -- I just sat, empty of analysis,
gripping the bedding as Maggie followed suit and leapt abruptly from the safety
of sleep.
The earthquake lasted about ten seconds. It was a 5.2, they later
concluded, centered on the San Andreas fault in the Santa Cruz mountains up
near the Lupin Naturist Camp past Lexington Reservoir. Energizing, exciting,
terrifying... the movement of earth is one of those graphic demonstrations that
things aren't always as solid as they seem -- that life ends, continents move,
stars collapse, businesses die, disks crash, revolutions fail. In the middle
of an earthquake, all your assumptions fall away like pretensions on a nude
beach, and you are bare human, surviving at the mercy of chance and the
elements. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Your house might fall down or blow
away. Someday all this will change as much as it already has, and your legacy
will be as vaporous as your last campfire... beautiful and poetic in life, a
subtle charring of rock a year later.
This is good stuff, earthquakes. When it passed, we gathered around the
stereo and listened to AM for the first time in a year, nodding and commenting
on the diverse tales of talk-show callers from Monterey to Sonoma. The whole
Bay Area was wide awake, reminded of life's precious fragility, frightened at
this tiny hint of what the Big One will be like, drawn together in a rare
moment of common interest. I realized again that what the world needs most is
a visit from a few aliens or a cosmic disturbance of some sort... there's a
refreshing feeling in "pulling together" that recalls that dimly remembered,
oversimplified, fictional past of small- town unity and childlike simplicity.
There were two smaller aftershocks, and the papers are full of nervous
speculation about the odds of a 6.0 hitting us in the next few days.
Apparently the ocean floor out here moves north about .2 inch per year, and the
strain has been building up for nearly a century. Something will give
eventually, everything will fall down, and it's going to be one hell of a show.
Conclusion: go on working for tomorrow, but don't forget to live for
today.
-- Steve